A blog is a way of communicating with an audience. They first started out as a place where you shared your thoughts, a place where each entry would start off with “Dear Diary.” However, blogs underwent a transformational journey and have come a long way from being just an online journal. Slowly, personal stories were being captured by the companies and marketers soon discovered the advantages of having a blog for business. The contents of blogs vary from educational, informative, pictorial and entertainment depending on the audience.

These are a few of the reasons you should be investing in a blog for your business. [Read more…]

Taking our business to the next level is what we all desire. Be it touching more lives, more freedom, or more profits. We all want to push our businesses to its potential. Growing a successful business has its share of challenges. The execution of our desires for our business and ourselves are met with some serious hurdles. These are the 3 reasons I find to be the difficulties we have to overcome in order to achieve the goals.

Understand the difference for a better chance at success.

Being an entrepreneur involves putting yourself out the in world. They risk their idea with the intentions of changing for the better. When you put yourself out there by default there are risks involved. You don’t get the desired outcome, waste money and resources along with time. However, a successful entrepreneur take risks but isn’t foolish to gamble with his future. There is a crucial difference between the two.

Risks are part of running a business. By definition it means uncertainty of return and potential loss, loss of time, energy and money. Entrepreneurs take risk with the team they surround themselves with, with the brand positioning. They risk reaching the desired goal with the decisions they make. Achieving success in business involves someone taking a courageous stand for something they believe in. Taking a chance that the idea wills change the world for the better. All decisions take into consideration that tomorrow will be better than today.

I am a big fan of learning and continuously growing yourself.

Ongoing learning comes with being passionate about a subject. However, recently I have learnt the hard way that there is a big difference between just learning and actually experiencing something. I got intrigued with the online space, after the birth of my first child. I was continuously listening to podcasts, reading blogs and articles about the subject. After about 18 months, I thought I knew all the basics to get started, and possibly turn this into a venture. I had my notes in Evernote, and with the help of Google, I, like everybody else, was pretty much the smartest person on the planet.

Founded in 2010, Instagram is one of my favourite social media channels. Instagram is a visual platform, and boasts of over 300 million active users a month. When Instagram introduced video on its platform within 24hours over 5 million videos were uploaded. With those sort of credentials it easy to see why this is the platform I spend most of my time on social media nowadays.

Go all-in on your strengths. Something author and social media guru Gary Vaynerchcuk is all about. Finding out what are your strength and how to operate the noise world of social media is where his book Crush It! why now is the time to cash in your passion, comes into play. Even though the book is written in 2009, it provides amazing value that it still very relevant today.

Twitter is one of those social media platforms you either get and love or ignore completely. Until recently, I ignored Twitter completely, only setup the account but didn’t spend time understanding it. Then, I started to tweet in hopes to have a larger impact and gain a bigger influence on an entrepreneurial journey of a person.

Really!? A Mission Statement Matters?

Most businesses have a mission statement. We know it is meant to represent what we are striving for. We use fancy words to come up with something that means nothing, resulting in us completely ignoring our mission statement. So why do we spend time to make something that ultimately we and our teams ignore?

Being generous means, give more than needed. How is giving more profitable? We are in the people business, not the jewellery business, not the consultancy business, not the real estate business but people business. We interact with people, we do business with people, and therefore are in the people business. No matter what we offer, we have to deal with people.

Still considering moving your business online?

In 2015 I attended a seminar on the impact of a digital age on India. Google with the help of Deloitte had done an extensive research on the topic keeping in mind the Indian small and medium businesses. The summary for the report is here.

The sector is broken down into 4 stages of the digital revolution. The first or offline stage consists of a staggering 36% of small businesses. This means that they don’t have a broadband connection and do not use emails, social media platforms or any digital tools for their business.